Figure(s)

My friends, it's been quite an eventful weekend, but it brought another "disaster struck" moment! 

The idea for the Panzer II vignette was to try some plastic figures from Dragon. I remember them being top quality back when I was a kid, and from what I've seen on the internet, they do look quite good when painted properly! 

Another thing that drawn me to them are poses - most resin figures on the market seem to be just soldiers or tankers standing... I don't know why, but most of them are very static. Plastic figures look more dynamic, but it seems like I've been tricked by the nice box-arts! 

The thing is, once you assemble them, clean up the seam lines and properly file the folds to make them more pronounced, they look pretty nice. But the poses... oh man, they're so stiff! I guess it's the limitations of the injection moulding process, but I'll be damned, these are some mighty unnatural poses. The pointing guy looks like a robot! 😅

Luckily, the other dude looks pretty nice. But another thing that bothers me is their gear. It needs to be glued to them, and it looks just like that - like it's been just glued to the figure. I don't know if I'm looking too much into this, or if I've been spoiled by a resin figure on the Jagdtiger, but it's safe to say my expectations have been crushed. 

What does it mean... well, it means that if I decide to push on, I'm only going to use the hunched dude (he's supposed to carry a rifle and a magnetic mine, which looks pretty cool), but I'm going to put him aside and instead focus on the vignette. 

I don't want to use a figure that I don't like just for the sake of using it. It would bring the overall impression of the tank and the terrain down. So I'll set him aside for a few days, in the meantime I'll create the groundwork, and then I'll go back to him with a fresh mindset and decide if it's actually worth it. I've looked up some resin figures on the internet after this discovery, but it comes again to the same thing - quickly getting some random figures just for the sake of putting them into a vignette. 

If I'm being fully honest, I'm very disappointed. Of course I didn't expect miracles from a set of 4 figures that costs 14€, but my hopes were they would look pretty good and it would be an interesting experience to paint them. But after assembling them, I don't feel like doing so at all 🙁

What are your experiences? Is it even worth looking at plastic figures, or is it resin all the way, even if their range is quite limited? 

Also, my deepest apologies for no updates - the final Panzer video took me 2 days to finish, and today I only managed to assemble these two gentlemen. As you can imagine from this post, I didn't feel very motivated after that 🤨